B

ank Central Asia (BCA), the nation’s largest private lender, is looking to expand its financial technology by investing up to US$30 million in digital banking development this year to improve ease of doing banking transactions.

In search of talent and ideas to do so, the publicly listed company organized the 2016 Finhacks mobile app contest for apps developers or practitioners of information technology (IT) to create an online payment system, known as an e-wallet, within 24 hours with access to BCA’s system.

“We are looking for innovations that can make carrying out bank transactions easier, so in the future, people do not have to visit the ATM hundreds of times in a month only to check their account balance,” BCA president director Jahja Setiaatmadja said Sunday at the closing ceremony of the Finhacks contest.

Aside from a payment system, BCA also plans to develop an online system for credit cards and mortgage loans.

“We are currently only developing an online payment system, but we will develop other systems, such as for mortgage loans so people can buy homes easily,” Jahja told reporters.

BCA executive vice president for strategic information technology Hermawan Thendean said the bank’s main focus was developing an online system that could run on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablet computers on account of the devices’ widespread use.

Smartphone penetration in Indonesia reached 43 percent in 2015, with up to 49 percent of people deeming their smartphone as their main device, according to a study by Google.

Fariz Tadjoedin, a 33-year-old IT freelancer, came out the winner of the Fintech contest with his multiplatform innovation called ChatBanking, accessible through Facebook and Telegram Messenger.

“ChatBanking is an advanced mobile banking model. People do not need to download any apps to make payments. They can do can so through Facebook by searching ChatBanking and can commence transactions by simply typing ‘hi’ in a message and following the next steps,” Fariz said.

The idea to hold the Finhacks contest was born a year ago when the lender’s director, Armand W. Hartono, met with developers at an IT community event. The developers expressed how difficult it was to interact with bank payment systems.

BCA, therefore, prepared an application programming interface — a set of routines, protocols and tools for building software and applications — that could be used by the developers to interact with the bank’s system.

Venture capital Ideosource managing partner Edward Ismawan Chamdani said he saw promising growth in the development of financial technology in the country.

“What the players need to do now is increase their apps adoption. The contestant with the biggest apps adoption will be the winner in Fintech,” Edward said, adding that Ideosource planned to invest in several attractive startups. (vny)